The gaseous effluents from the manufacturing of semiconductor materials, devices, products and memory articles involve a wide variety of chemical compounds used and produced in the process facility. These compounds include inorganic and organic compounds, breakdown products of photo-resist and other reagents, and a wide variety of other gases that must be removed from the waste gas before being vented from the process facility into the atmosphere.
Semiconductor manufacturing processes utilize a variety of chemicals, many of which have extremely low human tolerance levels. During processing (e.g. physical vapor deposition, diffusion, etch PFC processes, epitaxy, etc.), some of the tools used (e.g., chemical vapor deposition chamber, chemical mechanical polishing chamber, diffusion, etc.) as well as the processes may produce undesirable byproducts including, for example, perfluorocompounds (PFCs) or byproducts that may decompose to form PFCs. PFCs are recognized to be strong contributors to global warming.
These undesirable byproducts may be removed from the effluent streams via an abatement system. The abatement system may convert gases produced by the processing of substrates and flat panel display/LCD to less environmentally harmful versions to be emitted to the environment. The abatement systems may be coupled to semiconductor manufacturing tools, and typically may abate the process gases from the tool as they are produced. A need exists for an interface for operating and monitoring the abatement systems.